Crossing Carter

Former President Jimmy Carter (D-GA) has done many good things in the days since his presidency. Habitat for Humanity has been one of his personal causes, building homes for families that would otherwise never have had a chance to own a house. He has been a champion for humanitarian causes and has at least tried to build peaceful relationships between warring neighbor countries and groups. I have tremendous respect for much of what he has done since leaving office in January, 1981.

President Carter has also done a number of things that I strongly disagree with. This week he inserted himself into the debate about Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC), stating that he believed the congressman’s “You lie!” outburst during President Obama’s speech last week was borne of racism. He went on to say that Americans who oppose the President’s policies did so not because they disagree with those policies, but because the man is black.

“I think it’s based on racism,” Carter said. “There is an inherent feeling among many people in this country that an African American ought not to be president, and ought not to be given the same respect as if he were white. And this has permeated politics ever since I’ve been involved in it back in the 1960s, not only in the South, but also in many places throughout the nation.”

He added, “And the outbursts that we see, the scatological language, the sign that I saw on television last night, “We should bury Obama with Kennedy,” for instance, and “Obama is a Nazi,” and Obama’s picture with Hitler’s moustache on it—those kinds of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate over whether we should have a national program in health care. It’s deeper than that.”

I saw the very same reports President Carter saw. I saw the signs protesters were carrying. I did not see, in any of the reporting that I watched or have researched since, any signs saying that President Obama should be buried with the recently deceased Senator Ted Kennedy. Rather I saw people with signs to bury “Obamacare.” That is the colloquial term being used by many to describe HR 3200, which is the Democrat’s proposed health care reform bill.

There were also a few signs that referred to Obamacare as a “shovel ready” project. This clearly referred to one of the President’s favorite terms when he was promoting the economic bailout that was passed by Congress and signed by him early this year, and those signs showed a picture of a freshly dug grave, to indicate that Obamacare was dead.

Some people did carry signs comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler, but as The College Politico reported, many of the images were actually Obama supporters. Fascism was the adopted mantra of the NAZI party in Germany and is a political-economic construct. In fascism, private resources are heavily governed and regulated by a government that establishes production quotas, wages, prices and collective national standards (all part of Obamacare). It is also one of the surest systems for creating a tyrannical dictatorship, as history has shown in Italy, Germany and now Venezuela. The analogy is not as far off as many claim it to be.

There is racism in America today. I posted something about it yesterday here. And yes, there is subtle racism, where the racism is muted but just as damaging. And yes, some people are opposed to Barack Obama just because he is black, just as some people support him just because he is black.

An American who Opposes a President who wishes to adopt fascism in the United States, enable government to take greater control in our daily lives and restrict the free market from doing what it does so well does not in and of itself denote a racist. This is true no matter what the color of that President’s skin. Such arguments are specious, intellectually bankrupt and do nothing to further the debate at hand.